


Pilgrim's Progress

by TolkienGirl



Series: All That Glitters Gold Rush!AU: The Full Series [289]
Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Body Horror, Gen, Implied/Referenced Torture, Morgoth's Era of Confinement aka 1843, Other, POV Second Person, Umm...toxic masculinity in the extreme? general creepiness? you know the drill, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-23
Updated: 2020-08-23
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:21:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 785
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26074078
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TolkienGirl/pseuds/TolkienGirl
Summary: You count the walls: four, yes, in this room. But walls beyond that, and beyond that, too, that shall shutter you in for five years—Unless you make yourself like the termite, and bore your way out.
Relationships: Arien & Morgoth Bauglir | Melkor, Fëanor | Curufinwë & Morgoth Bauglir | Melkor, Manwë Súlimo & Morgoth Bauglir | Melkor, Morgoth Bauglir | Melkor & Sauron | Mairon
Series: All That Glitters Gold Rush!AU: The Full Series [289]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1300685
Comments: 4
Kudos: 8





	Pilgrim's Progress

_Believe me_ , Manwe says, with pain creasing his sunken cheeks, stretching the thin skin over his skull, pouching the hollows of his eyes. _If there were another way…_

Manwe is (to the eyes of many) hale with middle age, but _you_ see his ugliness. You see how strain has tormented him, has eaten at his flesh like a carrion-bird. And so _you_ smile, bloodless and pitying, leaning close almost enough to kiss his poor brow, and you say,

_I offer you my hands to bind, brother. Be gentle with the ropes!_

_There will be no fetters, I promise you. Lord, but sometimes I think we were raised…we were raised…_

_Raised wrong? Did Father beat you? He was always kind to me._

Manwe turns away to hide himself. You count the walls: four, yes, in this room. But walls beyond that, and beyond that, too, that shall shutter you in for five years—

Unless you make yourself like the termite, and bore your way out.

You are still smiling.

Men with throats throttled in high collars, with coals for eyes, tell you your fate. They call you a fool, or a scoundrel. They do not use those words exactly. Regardless, you listen placidly. When the time comes you put on the jester’s contrite mask and make your plea.

The result? No fetters.

No locks or doors or walls you cannot pass through.

It is done like this:

You are very sorry; you are a man who built a great temple of progress, who believed in what steel could become, and yet, they say and you say with them, that you were careless.

_Where were you, Melkor, these past years? It might not have come to this—_

Manwe again. Manwe who forgets your family’s slaves. Who forgets what interest you took in the hiring of overseers. Who forgets, and forgets, and forgets that you tried to kill him, more than once, when you were young.

_Have you any requests?_

You ask for nothing.

If you spoke a word…even a single word…you would tell them how you still hunger. You would show them, with a vivid poet’s picture, how the girl’s gasping body, the girl’s rolling eye, could not sate you.

That is where it went wrong, of course. Not in the death or bondage of a few hundred rat-workers! What of your circumvention of freeman laws, which shall pass away soon enough if they have not already? What of a few disappearances, yours and others’?

It _went wrong_ in a girl’s body, not on a factory floor. She would not offer you her bloom, and so you cut away all her petals. You are not contrite, but you are…

You are yet _desirous_.

Finwe is pasty prayer card, fit for a dust-heap. His son did not spring from him.

Feanor is like a fruit of the humid southeast, spined outside but soft of flesh within. You have never had him in your hands long enough to slice deeply against his rind, to greedily pluck him out of himself. This is a cause for fury, but seated immobile in one of your dark chairs, you ponder it as a sort of _eager_ , waiting fury.

You long for release; for the wild rambutan, the opuntia.

Gardens, always gardens, have been the lair of tempters like you.

_Did you not know, brother? Oh, I wish you could answer me plainly._

_Manwe, what have we_ ever _known? Business and the body politic; how doomed we both are. You are twice the man I am…so many times over the man I am…let me sit and learn at your feet, dear brother._

_Melkor—_

_Let this be a new beginning._

There are other bodies. Not the fruitful housing of the earth’s new hopes, but the celestial bodies that move restlessly across the heavens. The sailor’s daughter, a star. His maps; her figure’s lines.

Given another chance, you might anchor _her_ , rather than sink her like an anchor. Given the chance, you would stay Mairon’s hand before he tore her open for you. In her flowing blood, you divined the path of true contrition. Given the chance you will take another body, and you will treat it with such gentle cruelty that it shall think itself treated _well_.

_Melkor…these engravings are things of such beauty!_

_A gift from a doctor friend. I have so much to learn._

_I am glad to see you well._ Manwe is too much a coward to say what he really thinks: _to see you penitent_.

You are too much of earth and sky, made perfect in the matters of your mind, to tell him lies aloud.

Given the chance, you will find another way.


End file.
